Saturday, June 2, 2007

Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of commuting to a client site via a train across the beautiful Surrey countryside. I have come to realize that siteseeing from the train can sometimes be surreal....you are sometimes traveling so fast, you see something interesting and by the time your brain starts to process what you are seeing - its gone - the train has moved on. I wanted to share some of surreal, funny and just neat things that I have been seeing.

Naked Sheep: Apparently, in the past couple weeks it has been wool harvesting season. I had been seeing the cute, dirty, puffy sheep all spring here dotted in fields and one morning, to my surprise, the sheep were replaced with some bright white alien-looking animals! The sheep had been sheared and they were left to their super clean, bright white little bodies! That first siting was so funny once I realized what I saw that I nearly laughed out loud in the train. And over the past couple weeks more and more fields of sheep are going naked.

Bunny Fields: Bunnies are everywhere. I have been going past fields where it honestly looks like a farmer has a herd of bunnies! I have also seen three red fox just 30 feet away from these dozens of bunnies and ironically, everyone was just chillin'. That was a surreal train moment because I would have loved to linger at that site....were the foxes about to go on a hunt?...were they just relaxing?...were bunnies about to scatter like cockroaches? I'll never know unless a train goes by at the exact right moment. Another unusual bunny field was actually a RABBIT field...I am talking rabbits as big as cats...big ears, huge rabbits....and the surreal sight was a field of dozens of these large rabbits and a CAT standing with one leg up, as if frozen mid-walk, in the middle of this rabbit field. Again, I was wondering what was about to play out in that scene. That one was truly fascinating!

Cow Circles: Some of the mornings have been quite cold and I was surprised to see that cows cuddle in circles in the fields. I am talking about a filled-in circle, not a ring of cows. Even more strange, I saw one cow circle, then in the next field all the cows were up grazing, then in the next field many cows up grazing and two more cow circles. Per discussion with Josh, if one cow gets up the whole circle probably gets up. I just thought it was funny that some cows were "sleeping in"!

Well, those were some interesting and surreal train sites. I also see many red fox and a game bird that I have yet to identify. But, just wanted to share those animal phenomenon with you all!